Working out

I spent Sunday morning ‘working out’ on Daughter’s balcony overlooking Lake Geneva. So I was ‘working out’ as well as working ‘out.’ It was cold out there, but I soon warmed up and had to take my coat off. I know, coats are not exactly gym standard.

I felt quite literary doing this. The doing was ripping apart large cardboard boxes from Ikea. Hard work, when there is plenty of it and the cardboard is thick. Particularly the box that contained a sofa. We were lucky it even fit out there on the balcony, or we’d have been hard put even shifting sideways inside the flat.

The literary aspects have to do with Swedish crime writer Bo Balderson’s detective, who had galoshes that were too large. It was as he tried to rip up a newspaper to stuff those galoshes with, that the [then] Prime Minister Tage Erlander happened to walk past his office, and was so impressed by our detective’s loyalty (the front page contained an attack on the PM) that he made him a government minister. According to the new minister’s brother-in-law the minister was so weedy that ripping up a newspaper looked more like he was trying to tear the phone directory into pieces. (=loyal)

As I said, I did similar work on all that cardboard. And then I stuffed the black sack sized pieces into black sacks, tied them up and dumped them as anonymously as possible in the bins for the block of flats. Because contrary to what you’d think, far less is recycled in Switzerland than could be. On the other hand, I believe they might use the contents of everyone’s bins to heat the country. Which I suppose makes it more all right.

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